My thoughts/questions on the Santa Cruz
Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2004 7:07 pm
I'm not going to be very verbose (unless I start rambling), but I got my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz in yesterday from Newegg. Only $50 (OEM), no S&H, and I had first ordered it that weekend. That went smooth. But, well, I first got around to sticking it in there today.
I removed the POS SB Live card and stuck the Santa Cruz in there. I didn't even touch the software CD and went straight to the website to download the latest drivers, which I promptly installed.
There was no reboot necessary for the drivers. I've often run into this with other devices, and I think it has to do with XP. I can usually go to the standard SVGA crap drivers to the Detonators without a reboot too, but it seems as if the only time you still have to reboot is when upgrading, when the files you're replacing are still in use. Well kudos to Microsoft for making reboots as seldom as possible.
So immediately I had working sound and little Santa Cruz control panel instead of my standard Windows volume control. I normally despised the bloated Creative volume panels they used to try to rub off on me, but this one was A-OK and professional looking.
A lot of the stuff was standard, but take the equalizer settings. I'm sure I could have installed some bloated Creative application to get these with my Live, but basically you can control different volumes for the frequencies, as you would expect. Since I'm not that complicated, I just went for the "bass boost" preset, which sounded pretty much like turning up the bass in the Windows volume control.
I also noticed the 3d Stereo Enhancement option. Now, I had remembered this old feature back in the SB AWE32 days, where it was implemented via QSound. I was always very impressed, and it really made 3d games like Descent sound incredible, all the more impressive was that that was still DOS. Additionally, it always provided a nice bass boost for kicks too. But I had a two speaker setup back then, and now I was using headphones. I personally wasn't very impressed with the stereo enhancement on the Santa Cruz, but it may have been just that I was using headphones. Also it's possible that things these days just don't need stereo enhancement-- the stereo is enhanced enough! Well, regardless, I didn't like the option.
There were some other options relating to MIDI and reverb and stuff like that, but I just left those well enough alone.
Performance-wise, I was impressed with the card's MP3 performance. I had read that it had some sort of MP3 acceleration. Now, I don't know if that was just a gimmick or not, but something in that card is allowing me to play MP3's with WMP9 using 0-1% CPU utilization, 1-2% with the visuals. Once again, I don't know if this is any sort of acceleration, or just the lack of being full of ****, but I was impressed. This is especially impressive compared to my Live card that used to use ten times as much processor power! And all that time I had blamed it on WMP!
Games, of course, are also important, and there's where some of my troubles lied. Most games were fine, but in some, actually in one that I've found so far, Descent3, the sounds were simply too quiet with 3d sound. Sounds are way too quiet even at the maximum volume. Things were always a bit quiet with 3d sound in D3 with my Live, but nothing turning the sound volume to max wouldn't fix. So does anyone (Mobius?
) know how to get around this? That would be nice.
Other than that, the card seems great. Of course, I don't think I'm done playing with it yet.
I removed the POS SB Live card and stuck the Santa Cruz in there. I didn't even touch the software CD and went straight to the website to download the latest drivers, which I promptly installed.
There was no reboot necessary for the drivers. I've often run into this with other devices, and I think it has to do with XP. I can usually go to the standard SVGA crap drivers to the Detonators without a reboot too, but it seems as if the only time you still have to reboot is when upgrading, when the files you're replacing are still in use. Well kudos to Microsoft for making reboots as seldom as possible.
So immediately I had working sound and little Santa Cruz control panel instead of my standard Windows volume control. I normally despised the bloated Creative volume panels they used to try to rub off on me, but this one was A-OK and professional looking.
A lot of the stuff was standard, but take the equalizer settings. I'm sure I could have installed some bloated Creative application to get these with my Live, but basically you can control different volumes for the frequencies, as you would expect. Since I'm not that complicated, I just went for the "bass boost" preset, which sounded pretty much like turning up the bass in the Windows volume control.
I also noticed the 3d Stereo Enhancement option. Now, I had remembered this old feature back in the SB AWE32 days, where it was implemented via QSound. I was always very impressed, and it really made 3d games like Descent sound incredible, all the more impressive was that that was still DOS. Additionally, it always provided a nice bass boost for kicks too. But I had a two speaker setup back then, and now I was using headphones. I personally wasn't very impressed with the stereo enhancement on the Santa Cruz, but it may have been just that I was using headphones. Also it's possible that things these days just don't need stereo enhancement-- the stereo is enhanced enough! Well, regardless, I didn't like the option.
There were some other options relating to MIDI and reverb and stuff like that, but I just left those well enough alone.
Performance-wise, I was impressed with the card's MP3 performance. I had read that it had some sort of MP3 acceleration. Now, I don't know if that was just a gimmick or not, but something in that card is allowing me to play MP3's with WMP9 using 0-1% CPU utilization, 1-2% with the visuals. Once again, I don't know if this is any sort of acceleration, or just the lack of being full of ****, but I was impressed. This is especially impressive compared to my Live card that used to use ten times as much processor power! And all that time I had blamed it on WMP!
Games, of course, are also important, and there's where some of my troubles lied. Most games were fine, but in some, actually in one that I've found so far, Descent3, the sounds were simply too quiet with 3d sound. Sounds are way too quiet even at the maximum volume. Things were always a bit quiet with 3d sound in D3 with my Live, but nothing turning the sound volume to max wouldn't fix. So does anyone (Mobius?
) know how to get around this? That would be nice.Other than that, the card seems great. Of course, I don't think I'm done playing with it yet.
all the way up. If you experience any problems, like stereo balance being affected, make sure your master volume (On MAIN ta 
